Mobile internet technology is becoming more prevalent. Many people frequently use mobile devices to browse webpages. In order to improve the user experience with respect to mobile browsing, the development of page displays on mobile devices is becoming increasingly important.
Conventionally, in the area of mobile client development, hybrid applications are routinely used to achieve page display within an application executing at a mobile client (as opposed to displaying within the mobile client's default web browser application). To give an example, in the Android™ platform, the WebView functionality allows webpages to be displayed in a native format. Displaying webpages via the WebView functionality enables the display of webpages in various predetermined formats that can be operated on natively by the client (e.g., to realize different page effects or page transition effects), which can enhance the user experience. In order to achieve the effect of displaying the webpage in native view format (e.g., the format of viewing webpages that is native to the client), interception rules are typically set up on the client to capture the address (i.e., Uniform Resource Locator (URL)) of a selected link of the webpage and to perform matching and logical judgment processing of the captured URL in order to obtain the relevant information of the target page corresponding to the selected link. The relevant information of the target page may include formatting information or other attribute information that can be used to assist the mobile client application in judging which technique or which predetermined page format should be used to display the target page.
Because webpage content and attributes could change over time, the web address (e.g., URL) could also change. However, URL changes require modification to the URL matching and logical judgment rules. Moreover, it may also be necessary to modify URL matching and logical judgment rules for business reasons or other considerations. Therefore, the client side URL interception rules and matching and logical judgment rules stored at the client side must be modified accordingly. However, conventionally, the client side URL interception rules and matching and logical judgment rules are typically included with whichever version of the application is currently installed at the client device. Therefore, transferring modified client side URL interception rules and matching and logical judgment rules to the client requires the client device to download an updated version of the application that includes the modified client side URL interception rules and matching and logical judgment rules. However, dynamic updates of client versions that have already been published are not easy. To address this problem, conventionally, a new client version of the application that includes the modified client side URL interception rules and matching and logical judgment rules is made available for the user to access (e.g., in an application store). But developing new versions of an application increases development costs and resource consumption. Furthermore, users are also then required to update their versions of the application frequently, which can be very inconvenient.
Although partial dynamic updating of published client versions is possible on some operating platforms (e.g., such as the Android platform), certain technical means must be employed to bypass restrictions. However, bypassing restrictions may result in a high degree of technical difficulty and a correspondingly greater degree of update complexity, making feasibility very low.
Moreover, conventionally, URL interception to retrieve the target page information is usually performed on the client side, but data such as Document Object Model (DOM) data is not easily captured, which can be inconvenient.